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Deconstructing the Game: Renegade Ops

May you die a thousand deaths: Or at least 2 when you shouldn’t have. This is the most egregious of all of my complaints, and one that I hope I will never replicate. Say you are fighting some tank. You get distracted, or get too into the heat of things or for whatever reason you just die. You were fighting this thing with missiles or a flame thrower equipped and a level 3 machine gun. When you respawn you have none of that. Perhaps killing some enemies along the way back to fight the tank from the spawn point? Doesn’t usually reap what you would hope. So here you are, obviously having some problem fighting the big bad tank, and now you have to march right back into battle to try to kill the machine with even less than you had before. You will probably die another time, just because of this.

Putting a player in a state where he is now at an even worse disadvantage simply because he died doesn’t really seem like the best move. The situation is most definitely not by design, and more a flaw in the games balance, much like the above problem with secondary ammo spawning instead of an actual gun, or the eternal problem with a game like Zelda where you have 1 – 1 1/2 hearts left, the game is beeping because of this and all you keep getting are green freakin’ rupees.

Now, after my rather minuscule problems (and that one biggie right before) with Renegade Ops, here are the things I thought were great ideas and what I loved about them. You may notice a lot of things that counteract my above issues, and this is entirely why I loved the game so much. The problems that could have just been glaring flaws generally have great aspects that make them actually work.

Great first level gets the player hooked: One of the key goals for every game designer should be to create an engaging experience right off the bat. From the moment the game starts it shouldn’t leave the player waiting to play the game, and the tutorial level should be something that gets the attention of the player quickly.